Field of the Invention
Embodiments presented herein generally relate to rendering images of three-dimensional (3D) volume and, more specifically to rendering 3D volumes using adaptive buckets.
Description of the Related Art
Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) are widely used for rendering volumes representing scenes. A volume contains elements that make up a three dimensional scene which may be rendered to produce an image for display such as a computer display, cinematic film, video, etc. GPU hardware executes rendering programs or subprograms, in parallel, which produces the output image(s) in substantially shorter time than a nonparallel computing system.
However, a GPU does not dynamically allocate memory. Dynamic memory allocation is a feature in modern programming languages that provides a mechanism to request a portion of available memory when it is required and to release memory when it is no longer required. Doing so allows programs to process data that has varying memory requirements more efficiently.
One drawback of a lack of dynamic memory allocation in GPUs is that in some instances the rendering of a volume may fail. For example, if an insufficient amount of memory has been allocated to the GPU, individual rendering processes may exceed their allocated memory and artifacts will result. In this case the rendering must be restarted with either more memory allocated to the GPU, a reduction in the number of pixels processed by the GPU, or both. This problem can be exacerbated if the failure occurs at the very end of the volume processing; requiring a complete re-rendering of the entire volume.